FSFE: FOSDEM, Chaos Communication Congress, and Story of Evaggelos Balaskas

• Cory Doctorow +++ (pre-) FOSDEM +++ 36C3

  2020 is not just a new year, it is the dawn of a new decade. With more and more automated systems run by software, a political representation of freedom is more needed than ever. Read in our January Newsletter about why Cory Doctorow supports the FSFE financially and why you should do so too. Read about our upcoming FOSDEM activities including our pre-FOSDEM meeting and reflections on our presence at the Chaos Communication Congress. Also we have a new Software Freedom Podcast with Harald Welte and reports from our community.

• Report from the 36c3, about:freedom - about:fsfe

  At the end of December, FSFE was in Leipzig at the 36th Chaos Communication Congress. As in previous years, we were present at the congress with lots of information material, talks and workshops. FSFE was one of the main organisers of the cluster about:freedom, an association of 12 civil society organisations and groups. Together with the other organisations, we focused on digital rights and network policy issues. In about:freedom, a broad political spectrum of topics could be covered due to the many different focuses of the individual organisations and groups. At our booth we informed about Free Software and presented individual campaigns of us. Together with the cluster about:freedom, we organised 19 self-organised sessions during the 4 days. To only name a few, the hand-on workshop „Freedom to go“ for a Google Independent Android Smartphone by Erik Albers, the more general presentation "The Free Software 1x1: Clarifying the basics and typical misunderstandings", "Computer says no": Worüber sollen Algorithmen entscheiden dürfen by Chris Köver, Emergency VPN: Analyzing mobile network traffic to detect digital threats and the talk by Christian Busse regarding Free Software in Science: "Free Software for Open Science" were part of the sessions.

• The story of my first job in Tech Industry

  The other day I was thinking about my first ever job in this industry as a junior software engineer at the age of 20. I was doing okay with my studies at the Athens university of applied sciences but I was working outside of this industry. I had to gain some working experience in the field, so I made a decision to find part time work in a small software house. The experience and lessons learned in those couple weeks are still with me till this day … almost 20 years after!

More Python Programming Leftovers

• Hello Word in Django: How to start with Django

  In this article, we will learn how to develop and run a python-Django app in less than 5 minutes.

• Python GUI Programming With Tkinter

  Python has a lot of GUI frameworks, but Tkinter is the only framework that’s built into the Python standard library. Tkinter has several strengths. It’s cross-platform, so the same code works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Visual elements are rendered using native operating system elements, so applications built with Tkinter look like they belong on the platform where they’re run. Although Tkinter is considered the de-facto Python GUI framework, it’s not without criticism. One notable criticism is that GUIs built with Tkinter look outdated. If you want a shiny, modern interface, then Tkinter may not be what you’re looking for. However, Tkinter is lightweight and relatively painless to use compared to other frameworks. This makes it a compelling choice for building GUI applications in Python, especially for applications where a modern sheen is unnecessary, and the top priority is to build something that’s functional and cross-platform quickly.

• The contextmanager Decorator

  Context managers provide a cool programming pattern, especially if you’re forgetful or just have too much to keep track of and you want to simplify your life.

• URLs Lead The Way

  In the last article in the Understand Django series, we saw how a user’s browser request goes from their browser to Django’s “front door.” Now it’s time to look at how Django processes those requests. An HTTP request coming from a browser includes a URL describing which resource Django should produce. Since URLs can come in many forms, we must instruct Django on the kinds of URLs that our web application can handle. This is what the URL configuration is for. In the Django documentation, the URL configuration is called a URLconf, for short. Where is the URLconf? The URLconf is at the module path set by the ROOT_URLCONF setting in your project’s settings file. If you ran the startproject command, then that setting will be named like project.urls where “project” is the name given as an argument to the command. In other words, the URLconf is placed right next to the settings.py file in project/urls.py.

Do You Really Need Antivirus Software on Linux?

There’s a myth that Linux doesn’t have viruses. but for most people, it’s true that they don’t need an antivirus on Linux. How can both those claims be true? Do you really need antivirus on your Linux machine? Although there have been cases like EvilGnome, a piece of malware that made headlines last year for infecting Linux desktops, they are ultra-rare. The short answer is that thanks to being more securely designed, better maintained, and, truth be told, less popular, Linux ends up being safer than Windows. There’s no simple yes or no answer to the question of our title, though, as it depends on the user and their needs. Also: Security updates for Wednesday